tomes

in
the
fissure

t
here is a small
black wall

that
you
can
only see if
you
are
you
but
once
were

a different person. the words
are written in chalk that is invisible to the eye of an entity that is

unalte
red
from that which it started out as.
the
language of
the inscription is one that
you, too,
will speak when you go through this trans
formation.

like
a
cater
pillar

you will
e
merge;

a
new

and ready to take f
light.

but there are
no colours
when you r
each

the
other side. all will beco
me

the void;

your meta
mo
rpho
sis pallid and ashen in the hol
lows

with
in.

hymns in mute

there was fog inside of
the outside of
our silence and all that we could see were the trees.
the map that they posted to us in another century
was sent from a country that does not even exist and you say you want to sleep.
sleep like there's no tomorrow,
sleep like yesterday is a bygone era;
sleep like you mean it.

i, on the other hand, allow for blurred lines. i may even welcome them.

all i know is that the trees are far from silent.

a dictionary of the sea; part one

She fears that she may be slowly drowning (except that water is no longer in existence.) He holds onto her ever so tight; he has had nightmares that comprise of him crawling around the inside of an old tin box-the rust taking the shape of maps baring cruel seas. She imagines a gang of pirates making her walk the plank. But they are made back-to front and she never quite knows which one is presently abusing her. In his hallucinations he is no longer himself; rather he is a survivor of a ship-wreck that never really happened. But somehow he has found himself eternally alive, (yet dead) at the bottom of a very dark Ocean. Sometimes she deludes herself into the thought that this all happened. Most times though she tries to envisage that it didn’t. His reveries are more trance-like; he hears his own soul commanding him to have courage. They wander from edge to edge on an atlas that doesn’t have a grid.

she wears a diadem

on the days in between the seven weekdays I try to sleep.
There is nothing else for it
and the paper boat doesn't have warm water in those times or i would draw a bath
(i would use my best purple pencil,
as a mark of respect for my mourning)

'colour coded' - a short introduction

i dream of you in colours that are not even real.

in my dreams you whisper to me in a language i am sure has never once been spoken before you took it as your own.
you wear trousers and cardigans either long gone out of fashion or that will be something our children's children will wear (and i know, despite being asleep, that these said 'children' will be one in the same).

in these dreams you sing lullabies that wet my sleep filled eyes and gladden my adoring heart.

we live in a house that is surrounded by trees and foliage foreign to me (never, in all of my rambling wanderings, have i seen such a green.)
and you speak to me of afternoons on a beach i have never been to, swept along by a wind whose breath i have never felt.

but it in these dreams there lies no grey area, lover of mine.
it is always, always and always you.

‘A measure of the earth’ or a short history of geometry

He gazes at the list in front of him, completely mesmerised. He had never, ever dreamed there would be so many. Before he had gone looking for this list he had thought there would be around twenty. The obvious ones (circle, square, triangle) and then some more complex ones (rhombus, oval, octagon and the like). He feels especially stupid today. This little boy feels stupid every waking moment of every day in this strange land but today the idiocy is more notable to him, more repulsive.

He scans over the ancient words in awe. Polygon (concave, constructible, convex, cyclic, decagon, digon, dodecagon, nonagon, equiangular, equilateral, star), henagon, hendecagon, heptagon, hexadecagon, hexagon, icosagon, pentagon, octagon, decagram, octagram, heptagram, hexagram, pentagram, triangle ( acute, anticomplementary, equilateral, excentral , isosceles, medial, obtuse, rational, right, isosceles right, Reuleaux , Kepler, scalene), parallelogram, equilateral parallelogram: rhombus, Lozenge, rhomboid, rectangle, square, trapezium, isosceles trapezium, quadrilateral, cyclic quadrilateral, tetrachord, kite, tangential quadrilateral, trapezoid, isosceles trapezoid, circle ( circumcircle, excircle, incircle, nine-point, circular sector, circular segment) , crescent, ellipse, oval, Reuleaux polygon, rotor, lens, rounded rectangle, semicircle, sphere, stadium, Archimedean spiral.

He realises that the sole purpose of this classification is to separate each individual structure based wholly on its difference from the other. He feels a pain he has just about managed to forestall his entire short life up until this point. He holds his breath and counts to twelve but he still feels shrouded in the darkness. The book’s coloured outlines and contours are suffocating him, slowly. He will never know what shape the folk of his soil fall into. He sees not what way their lines point, nor does he know how black a silhouette their pain embodied on paper maps. Equally so, he cannot dare to try to read the contours of the landscape he inhabits due to reasons unknown to his little mind. (Its people lie down proudly in their own shape formations and there is no space in their tessellation for his alien hemitery.)

The break-down of shapes is beginning to make his eyes sting with angry, scared tears. He could never fit in a place that he has only experienced, (like his furniture, clothes and handful of personal belongings) - second-hand. He would feel as isolated in that land his Mother had fled with him in belly as he does here in the only land he has known, without knowing. He has not yet read any Said, Bhabha or Fanon but when he does he will understand more. He will feel the full gravity of his loss. He will see that his young mind was forced to surrender a little bit of innocence there and then, doing this homework of ‘An introduction to Geometry’. He understands now, at this point however, that so many people in his world see themselves as one particular shape, and him as another. And these shapes are universes, never mind continents or centuries apart. The little boy will spend many years trying to morph himself into one shape, then another and yet another still. In his nightmare-filled sleep he will fight and revolt against the idea that people are just like shapes. In his despair he will try to deny that both label the others around them through surface configurations that distinguish one thing from its surroundings. He tries so hard to refute this because it makes the aching loneliness in his bones ease for a moment. But in the harsh light of day, he cannot hide from the truth. It sneaks up on him at every given opportunity and punches him hard as ever in the stomach. And he is lucky that he has not been assigned any shape whatsoever in this life, or these blows to his ghost-shadow might leave a mark.

Things to do when you get there

Sleep.
Worry that you have actually got there and not dreamt it,
awaken.
Continue to worry that you are not presently dreaming,
drink very strong coffee,
floss.
Read ' The encyclopedia of getting there' from cover to cover (spending extra and special time on the 'activities on arrival' section).
Talk yourself into the the thought that you have never even experienced desire to get there, nor wanted to do anything upon arrival.
Drink even more, even stronger coffee.
Weep.
Drink some wine, weep in a foreign language.
Burn your possessions. Cough. Sleep.
Weep whilst sleeping, laugh, awaken.
Smile. Draw a bath.
Laugh in native and foreign tongues.
Collate a list of things to do when you get there.
Rinse in icy cold water and repeat . . .
. . . . etc et etc et etc et etc et etc et etc . . .

[6th January was the day on which this was created. It was at Napier University Edinburgh after reading Siegfried Sassoon's 'Aftermath'.]